


The Return of Billie Lurk: A Novel

by Atypicalgamergirl



Series: Old Man Daud [5]
Category: Dishonored, Fable (Video Games), LOVECRAFT H. P. - Works
Genre: Baleton, Blood and Gore, Dunwall, Other
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-19
Updated: 2019-02-02
Packaged: 2019-02-17 01:43:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,614
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13066524
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Atypicalgamergirl/pseuds/Atypicalgamergirl
Summary: *Overseer Ryan Courick is a creation of Orb.https://atypicalgamergirl.deviantart.com/art/Overseer-Courick-concept-and-portrait-705862399Many thanks to Orb for giving me the opportunity to work on this, and to donate his persona as a character in my works.





	1. Part 1: The Rising

Overseer Courick* stared out into the cold clear night glumly. He had tried, but failed to get out of the graveyard duty. He had offered several of his brethren everything from a full box of Cullero cigars to a bottle of rare Flin picked up on his recent excursion to Baleton but even those were not enough to convince any of them to take up the shift on Endoria street, and particularly not to spend the evening walking loops around the Loyalist section. Courick was not a superstitious man, so he was not concerned about the mouldering bones under the ground so much as he was the Cultists who were determined to get to them. 

It had been a few years since they caught the first one. At first it was thought that the man was a paid graverobber hired by some miscreant from the Academy, but it had become quite clear under interrogation that he was there for an altogether different purpose. He had held up as well as to be expected under the interrogation methods, but regardless of what increasingly severe levels of interrogation he was subjected to they could get nothing from him with the exception of the promise that the Order would do to each and every one of the interrogators ten times what had been done to himself. They could not break him, and to the High Overseer's fury the man had died laughing through broken teeth - he last act winking with what was left of his remaining eye as he passed over into the Void. 

Even now, some years later they knew very little of the Order except that they were dangerous - perhaps more so than black magic practitioners in the past. They were secretive and very low profile. There were no names that they knew of to even start an investigation, and reported sightings rarely held more information than fanciful descriptions of hooded figures and black masks. They could not be more than a handful in numbers, as surely people walking about clothed as described would be quickly rooted out by the Overseers. Uniforms and other identifying garb had fallen out of fashion with the various groups running Dunwall's underworld. It was no longer easy to suss out the criminal element - the gangs of years past had moved on to more conventional means of commerce: Hatters cleaned up, wised up and now ran Drapers Ward with competent professionalism. It was even a former Hatter who currently held the lucrative contract for the Overseer Uniforms and newly-developed Hound armor. The Bottlers disbanded, and most now worked at the old Brigmore place - now a bustling and highly productive distillery and high-end tobacco production operation, run under the skilled direction of Mr. Azariah Filmore. The Eels were probably the most reformed, having become a formidable branch of the Wrenhaven Waterfronters chartist organization. They went by the name of the Drapers Ward Dockers, and took their work very seriously - he would watch the Strider make way up and down the river, marveling at how time could compel such interesting turns. With that many serious miscreants gone legitimate some shady organization walking the streets of Dunwall wearing hooded capes and black masks would have stuck out like a very large and very sore thumb.

That the Abbey could not find them, however did not mean that they were not there. There had been many pieces of evidence left here and about of their presence. They had made it clear that they were watching, always watching. There had been several attempted graverobbing efforts since then - always a proxy, never a member of the Order. They were smart enough not to dirty their own hands, and especially smart to use people who could not - or would not turn on their paying masters. They used addle-brained people, people who were simple in a wide-eyed but vicious way - much like Hounds could get if taken one to many hits to the skull. Most could speak, but none could do so with any semblance of sense. Courick did not know where they were getting these people but he had to admit that using that brand of folk was a smart idea. They were loyal, strong, lacking any fear of retribution, and above all were only a half-level at most above what could be said to be the lowest form of intelligence that still maintained a thread of humanity. They reminded him very much of the monster Morris Sullivan, in wits only perhaps. None of the ones they caught were anything out of the ordinary looking except for the vacant look in their eyes - that was a trait they all shared. They took their torture quietly without saying a word, almost with a sense of duty - they simply went limp and died as soon as their bodies allowed for it.

Courick lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply and started to make another round. Smoking in uniform was verboten, but Courick was not one to give that much thought. He did plenty in uniform outside of the watchful eyes of his brethren. He hadn't quite gotten to the Loyalist Section when to his astonishment a young woman came walking out of the darkness making her way to him. She had an unusual style to her fiery red hair and was dressed in an outfit that while certainly out of current style was no less sharp looking for it. She had on high boots and tight breeches, and a short green jacket over a snappy vest. As she got closer, he couldn't help but to stare in wonder that she did not appear to be wearing a shirt under the vest and he could see quite a bit more of her chest than a woman would normally walk about showing. She did not have the worn seedy look of one of the Golden Cat ladies, so he was perplexed not only by her dress (or noticeable lack of such) but by the fact that it was nearing the dead hour of four in the morning and she was walking up with a perkiness that spoke more of a mid-morning brunch than what should be the end of a particularly long night. She was carrying a bulging paper bag in her hand and held it in front of herself as she made her way to him. Courick stopped and stood his ground, waiting for her to approach. He opened his mouth to give her warning but she beat him to the first words. 

"Good evening, Overseer! What a fine night for a walk. I always did so love the bracing air of the night." Courick could only blink behind his mask, struck dumb by the incredibly improbable nature of what was unfolding before him. "I've just come from the bakery, and wouldn't you know they already had hot-pops out in the window and I bought up the whole bunch!" Courick's mind was racing as he tried to put together some semblance of an intelligible answer. She opened the top of the bag, and a warm yeasty smell with an edge of perfectly burned sugar drifted up from it and Courick found himself suddenly, and nearly violently hungry. In a daze he reached out his hand but she stopped him. "Ah, ah Overseer. It would not do to dip those dirty gloves in." She smiled mischievously up at him, and he was surprised at how quickly she had managed to broach his space - in fact she had somehow made her way to within inches of him without an awareness that she had done so. She had seemed to just suddenly be _there_. He could see the tips of crooked eyeteeth peeking from her smile, and under the smell of the fresh rolls he could smell her - some perfume that spoke of some faraway place, cigarettes, and some deep and complex female smell just under that. He was uncomfortable with her proximity but found himself peeling away his gloves all the same. He flexed his hands, damp from the confines of his thick rough gloves and stiff in the cold air. She was looking at him, seemingly directly through his mask - her eyes drilling into his as she held the bag up for him. 

He reached in and savored the warmth of the soft rolls as he grabbed a couple. They were smaller than he thought, and when he pulled his hand from the bag he stared down in wonder at what lay in his palm. If they were rolls, he had damn sure never seen anything like them before. They looked more like turnips, or radishes with a round bulbous bottom and some strange wiry protrusions springing from their tops. He went cold inside, a realization sinking in - and before he could drop them the wiry hair-like protrusions had fastened themselves to his skin. He snapped and started shaking his hand trying to shake the things loose but to his horror they not only held fast - they began to sink into his skin dragging their bulbs along with them. There was no pain but he was unable to move or speak - could only watch as his skin opened bloodlessly and painlessly to the bulbs as they entered his body one after the other, the skin closing behind them. The lumps worked their way up his arm, and he watched them until they disappeared under his sleeve. He looked at the girl wildly, but she merely tilted her head to one side - grinning widely, perhaps a little too much so. He wasn't sure how he had mistaken her for charming. Her smile was feral - ratlike, and her eyes were dark - black nearly. His thoughts began to scatter wildly as he sensed that the things that were inside of him had begun to multiply. He could feel them bulging and swelling, their hairy roots tickling inside his gut, his lungs - by the Void, they were crawling into his mouth! He spat helplessly, pulling at the hairs vibrating against the roof of his mouth but the bulbs were stuck fast. They grew faster now, and he began to itch - itching from inside out as the wiry hairs burst through his skin waving and thickening and lengthening. He gagged around the root-like growths springing from his mouth and rapidly growing into a tight weave around him. They were all over him now, holding him still. He could only shake his head helplessly as she reached up and gently removed his mask. The rootlings had covered his face and held his eyes open, the cold breeze burning his drying exposed eyeballs. She chuckled lowly, and gestured slightly as if emphasizing a point and he felt himself pivoted around to face the Loyalist section. She leaned into him, her face close to his in a move that in other circumstances would have sent his blood racing in an entirely different way. "You will watch, Overseer and you will share what you see here. It is the only reason that I intend to let you live." 

He watched as she walked at first aimlessly over the muddy chunks of sharp rocks put down to thwart graverobbers. Her steps quickly became more deliberate, and she stopped and turned to face him. Though she was some distance away, her face seemed to be floating in front of his. She nodded and then his mind teetered on the edge of shattering as she _melted_ into some black substance that seemed to be both smoke and thick liquid - a flowing darkness that floated impossibly in the air before settling to the ground and quickly sinking in. He wanted so badly to scream, but his mouth was clogged with roots - their sharp wiry hairs stinging the inside of his mouth and tongue. He was not aware of time passing, but it was as the first weak rays of the sun were breaking into the darkness that he saw the patch of ground at first tremble and then bulge rhythmically as something made its way to the surface. The thick black oily substance erupted first, the tendrils of itself coalescing and fading into various human colors as it formed itself back into the strange red-headed woman. The rocks shifted and rolled away, and an obscene sucking sound erupted from the muddy soil as something broke the surface and began to rise from the muck. When Courick saw what it was, he found no difficulty screaming through the polyps choking his mouth. When the girl made her way to him, he could only look at the thing that had crawled up from the dirt. It was weaving unsteadily, testing its legs and shaking off as much of the mud as it could. He saw the girl gesturing before him and did not notice the sudden emptiness as the polyps were waved into inexistence. His screams had gone hoarse, his mind unable to grasp what he was seeing. When the dirt creature rubbed the mud from its face and looked at him, Courick's mind finally broke and he fainted - the last sounds in his conscious mind the hoarse rasps of what was left of his screams.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *Overseer Ryan Courick is a creation of Orb.
> 
> https://atypicalgamergirl.deviantart.com/art/Overseer-Courick-concept-and-portrait-705862399
> 
> Many thanks to Orb for giving me the opportunity to work on this, and to donate his persona as a character in my works.


	2. In a Place Outside of Time

He sat, or was maybe standing - he wasn't sure anymore and his mind had lost the basic meanings of these actions long ago. He only knew the Dark now, the deafening quiet. There was only himself and his shadows - so many of them, packed together tightly to form an undulating being of darkness- not quite liquid, not quiet aetheral. He had long since stopped watching them chase themselves around him as they packed him in tighter and tighter, they no longer intrigued or even interested him even when they weaved in and out of his form like fat black eels through a drowned corpse. He thinks he may have tried to speak to the shadows once, but thought itself was too ephemeral to grasp anything as large as memory. If there were others here besides his own shadows he didn't recall seeing them. He only knew that he was here, and before he was here he was... it was lost to him. He did not feel cold or warmth nor did he feel pain or comfort.

He knew that he was a shell of some sort, and that the shell was meant to carry something but did not remember what it was. He shifted and moved as he sometimes did, it could have been minutes since the last time he moved or maybe it was years - or thousands of years. Time was no longer something his mind was constrained by, but somewhere deep in his shell there were still old patterns left - patterns which he turned to less and less often. His feet made sounds against the slick black surfaces that he found comforting insofar as he was able to feel so. It was one of the last things that he was able to hold on to that was familiar - the cadence of his feet, the sound so familiar, a clacking as he walked toward _something_. It was lost to him but the sound rooted him to some place that he somehow knew that he had belonged in once. He listened to the sounds for a bit, and it took him more than a while to realize that the sounds of his feet were not the only sounds he could hear now.

It was faint, but sneaking in and around the sounds of his feet he could hear a strange wet snuffling and grunting shot through with hard bursts and stops. The sound carried its own cadence, a rhythm that tickled some stain of a memory somewhere inside of him. He stopped and really _listened_ and in time he remembered what this sound was. Words. Speaking. He strained to find the direction of the voice and after turning around staring blindly into the liquid dark he realized it was coming from inside himself. His mind groaned and stretched, expanding and filling - he knew that it wasn't himself he was hearing. It was a... a _woman_. His memory seized and then jerked inside his mind, rearranging itself around the pockets of Void that made up most of his insides and connected. It was _her_. He stood still, willing her to continue speaking and she did. She talked for minutes, days calling to him over and over. Sound became a memory, and a memory became a reality. She spoke only the same words now over and over. The words were piercing - something like a memory of pain shot through him as the words tore apart the darkness inside of him and the words burrowed deeper into his mind, ripping deeper in - opening his brain, his thoughts. The words were a pattern of light seared into the backs of his sunken eyes and when he saw them splayed out with the shapes capturing the sound of her voice he suddenly remembered what those words were.

She was calling his name, and from his dark corner of the Void Teague Martin answered her call.


	3. Our Lady Bitterleaf

_Wake up, child! There’s another one. Those blasted Whalers have been might busy as of late. Come now, don’t dawdle. You know your brothers will especially need you tonight. Noah is waiting right outside for you. That’s a good girl, let’s get you nice and warm and that hair! Tsk tsk. Now let me just comb it a bit, there you are. Now you remember to hold Noah’s hand, and don’t let him lose sight of you, you hear? The little girl nods and wipes the sleep from her eyes, mussing the quickly fingercurled ringlets falling around her face. Her mother tuts lightly, and lays a kiss on the crown of the little girl’s head and nods solemnly to her brother Noah who waits in the doorway nearly wiggling with excitement to get going. The girl takes her brother’s hand and together they head out into the night to catch up with their older brothers, already well on the way to Rothwild’s where they had been called by the City Watch to do some post-Whaler cleanup. They had really done a number this time, it seemed. Noah kept a close grip on his little sister’s hand, pulling her along ever so gently to get caught up. If their brothers got there and the Whalers were still messing about on the rooftops, they’d be in for it without their sister there. The little girl’s steps picked up as they got closer to Arran Avenue. She could feel her brothers now, and Noah called out to them in a hoarse whisper. She could see their silhouettes now - they were standing at the end of an alleyway lit only by a strange blue-purple light that hurt the girl’s eyes to look at. She looked around, puzzled. This wasn’t where Rothwild’s was – she was sure they were heading straight up Aaran. She didn’t recognize this street, but there was a job to do and if her brothers were here, then this must be the place. Noah dropped her hand and ran ahead, eager to get started. He was the youngest of the brothers – not quite old enough to join them officially, but for the past year had been allowed to participate in addition to guiding her to them for her protection. She stood for a moment, surprised that Noah had run off like that and watched as he caught up and together the brothers dipped into the alleyway and disappeared into the barely visible blue-purple light. Noah would usually bring her close and whisper ‘now, do the turtle thing little one’ and she would look to the turtle in her mind, a great wide flat thing with a thick protective shell and she would send her thoughts out from the turtle, out from her mind and send them over her brothers – thick, impenetrable, so much so that not even the one in the red coat could break through them, as many times as he had tried. Her brothers would be free to clean up and determine amongst themselves the cause of death, and most of the time could also figure out why the victims were killed, and by whom. She knew somehow that if the mask-men were to catch their thoughts, she would lose her brothers. She stepped cautiously toward the alleyway looking around for Overseers, suddenly afraid. Her mother had warned her to never be caught alone with one. She was afraid they would take her away and she would never see her brothers or Mum or Da’ again. She didn’t see any Overseers, and she widely skirted the large three storey building that made up part of the alleyway wall. The oil lamps seemed dimmer here somehow, the light a sickly weak color. She couldn’t hear her brothers now, and cautiously peered around the corner into the alley. The blue-purple light seemed to tease her eyes, darting from the forefront to the peripheral of her vision no matter how hard she tried to see its source. She could see something at the end of the alleyway now – a figure laid out at the end lit from above by a light she could see no source for. Her brothers were nowhere to be found. Above her suddenly the ‘wsssssskkkkk’ of the mask-men zipping across the rooftops, or so she thought. When she looked up she saw nothing but empty rooftops. She walked closer now to the figure, catching the occasional chill as if ghosts were walking through her. She thought she could hear whispers, but could see only the wind brushing bits of stiff debris across the rough cobbles. The air seemed to thicken somehow the closer she got to the figure laying at the end of alleyway, but she continued on – more intrigued than afraid now. It was a young man, not more than a boy with dark skin and hair and his naked exposed body was covered with thin black bloodless wounds as if someone had carved pictures into the boy, and his throat had two gaping holes in it – one on each side. His skin was puckered around the wounds as if trying to draw itself into them. There was something clutched tight in one hand, and blood had pooled under his hand. When she bent her knee to get a closer look a burst of air caught her from behind and suddenly her brothers were around her. She stood in alarm as the first of the ‘wwssssshhhhhht’ sounds floated down from above. The masked men! Her brothers! She reached into her mind deep for the turtle but it seemed to be gone. In a panic she threw her thoughts inward again and again trying to pull the cloaking from within her to spread protectively over her brothers but the deeper she sent her thoughts the more raw her mind became from the efforts and she realized that her thoughts were splayed open now – ripe for reading by the masked men, and worse – the thoughts of her brothers as well. Noah gently pulled her back as their brothers bent to the figure but she was still close enough to see that when they pried the boy’s hand open it was deeply embedded with broken parts of a shell, and what had been a small turtle had been reduced to a bloody clot in his fist. If her brothers found this odd they didn’t remark on it. She heard something then, some strange sound coming from the rooftop of the larger building – it was the sound of ship bells being bent and twisted through the fog, honking and pinging a song as if from a faraway broken music box. She looked up, sure that the red coat man would be up there looking down ready to fly down and cut their throats but it wasn’t him. It was a lady, no – closer to a girl with wild red hair flying around her face in the wind. “Addie,” she said and …_

1855, Dunwall 

Adelaide Bitterleaf woke in a sweat, panicked for reasons she was rapidly forgetting as the dream shredded itself against the hard morning light and dissolved to mist. She closed her eyes hard, trying to shake the feeling that something had changed but as she patted her hands up and down her form from head to toe could feel nothing amiss. She shivered as the cold of the morning seeped under her blankets and curled around her. Dr. Killjoy had recommended that she sleep in the nude, and so now she did. She wasn’t sure what it was supposed to help by doing so but she did have to admit that for some reason she slept far more soundly than usual – though that could easily have been a result of the tincture he prescribed for her at bedtime. 

She had been delighted at first when Dr. Killjoy had called on her. She had heard of him, but never figured that he would find her case interesting enough to take her into his care. Her melancholy and muteness was unfortunately well-known. She had always been seen as a strange little girl, the wee Bitterleaf lass who loyally followed her brothers along on their corpse recovery efforts. The girl who had seen the dead Empress herself, and walked along behind her brothers as they gently carried the Empress’s limp form into the Tower and down into the coldest part under the Tower where the High Overseer had run the Bitterleafs out as soon as the Empress was laid out on the bright marble slab that seemed to be waiting down there for her in some strange way. It had taken Addie every effort she had to keep the cloak tight around her brothers and herself as they carried the Empress inside. She could feel her brothers’ grief and pain, and underneath that - their sneaking suspicions that perhaps all wasn’t as it appeared. She remembered the High Overseer glaring at her, his eyes flat like tarnished coins. She was afraid of the Overseers, and the High Overseer scared her most of all. She was glad to be ushered out so unceremoniously. She would never forget that day, no matter how hard she tried. 

Her years after were spent watching her brothers marry off one by one, taking elegant gentle wives who gave them quiet serious children, many of whom themselves were now nearly grown. Addie had remained unmarried to her father’s dismay and though he and her mother had tried, had failed to find a suitable match for her. What had been a respectable gravitas for her brothers’ profession had simply been seen as creepy and strange in regards to Addie, particularly since she did not speak. She was a plain looking girl admittedly, but no more plain than any number of other girls who had been taken in for marriage. She supposed she carried some stink of death that was undetected in her brothers. As the years passed, she attracted very little attention from anyone except those fringe folk who had an endless fascination with death and the Void – clearly not understanding that the fact of the matter was that death was rather mundane and the Void just another conduit to something that was probably equally mundane. 

She stood and pulled her housecoat from the hook beside her bed, and shrugged herself into it and made her way to the small table that stood in front of the large double windows that faced out over the street leading into what had been the old Distillery District. The kids would start in any moment now – mean faced kids who loved to gather under her window and shout up at her. She could hardly blame them though – she was, after all ‘Creepy Addie’ who lived in Granny Rags’ old place. No one who saw the handsomely built limestone building with its intricately carved stone tracery and tightly-slated gambrel roof would ever mistake it for the old dilapidated building that had stood there before but Dunwall had a long memory, particularly for anything that spoke of witchery or death. Addie had been dismayed when her father had gifted her the building, but ultimately delighted after seeing the plans for its remodel – delighted enough to overlook that the building was quietly a replacement for a husband she would never find. Still, she was grateful to her parents for providing and was thankful for each day spent in the beautifully remodeled building. Though it had been some years, there was still the occasional scent of fresh plaster, clean split wood and new textiles that she would catch in the air in the rooms. The kids though, the kids tended to bring a bit of darkness to her days and now that she had reached her thirtieth year unmarried the darkness had begun to creep in from the inside as well. Her thirst for child-bearing had come and gone (mostly, anyway) and any hopes for a chance at a late-comer to sweep her off her feet had begun to fade two years earlier when finding herself increasingly sat at the ‘spinster table’ at various gatherings. Eventually even some of the spinsters left the table, moving on to men who for whatever reason wanted them. Even that gib-faced Anna Pendleton had landed a decent man and had children! Addie had eventually stopped going to these soirees, and a deep melancholy had begun sinking in not long after. 

She was not sure who had brought her case to Dr. Killjoy’s attention, but she was glad he had taken her in. She had been seeing him for a few weeks now, not long but she could already feel that something was shifting and changing, or perhaps just stripping away from inside of her – maybe that was what she was feeling this morning, in fact. 

Like clockwork, the first of the kids began meandering around under the second floor window and with the courage that comes with camaraderie began calling up to her ‘Granny Addie! Granny Addie!’ She sighed and made her way around the small table to the window, leaning with her palms down on the wide window-sill – her forehead nearly touching the cold pane. She closed her eyes and reflexively reached inside to pull her cloak of silence around her. She stood completely still, her eyes wide in shock. It was gone. Some wild snip of thought floated through _the turtle died, its dead, its dead!_ and she shook it off. Her childhood was far behind her now, and childish thoughts of an imaginary turtle far gone with it. It was her protection, her only protection against others and it was simply gone. She dared not try again, something like a memory of warning inside of her – the dream skirting just out of reach now. 

She stood back then, letting the shouts and calls of the kids below fade into the background noise of Dunwall – the clack and rhythmic clanks of the steel wheels of the sleek carriages that traveled the citywide roof-level transit system, the sounds of industry and work as shopkeepers called ‘hulloas’ to one another. Something caught her gaze then – some small movement out of the corner of her eye. A wharf roach. Of course. It was an unavoidable part of living at the riverfront, even in such a building she lived in she supposed. She had stopped killing them long ago. She had read somewhere, or perhaps overheard it in a conversation that for every one you saw in the light there were hundreds, if not thousands within five feet away scuttling all over each other in the darkness. She felt weary then, the weight of her empty life falling heavily over her shoulders. Dr. Killjoy’s treatments were helping, but even those couldn’t seem to keep all of the melancholy at bay. 

Her first visit with Dr. Killjoy had been filled with anticipation. He was certainly a handsome man, and the touches of silver at his temples and peppering his mustache and eyebrows did nothing but enhance the intense look that he was known for amongst the whispers of the Dunwall women affluent enough to be in his circles. He had been present in Dunwall for some years, traveling back and forth between his asylum in Potterstead, but it had been his miraculous cure of the notorious Pendelton twins that had shot him to medical stardom. Anyone who had the displeasure of mixing with those louts had felt only the smallest pity for their condition when they returned from what many had speculated a certain death. They had been reduced to a sort of retardation evidently, but under the care of Dr. Killjoy had rallied to robust health albeit a quiet one. To this day, neither was able to speak but one supposed that having their tongues ripped out was an understandable reason for it. Not even Dr. Killjoy could grow back their tongues, but Custis and Morgan had grown back into some prominence and had thus far successfully rebuffed the inevitable swooping down of the Dunwall hens looking for a marriage. If the twins could be cured, then perhaps Addie could be as well. She remembered receiving the letter hand-delivered to her door several weeks ago – cracking the deep red wax seal to neat handwriting stacked in precisely measured lines and signed with a flourish. She had thought it a joke at first, but the knock on her front door came at precisely the appointed time and when she opened the door she could hardly believe her eyes. Dr. Killjoy was as intensely handsome as rumored when she saw him up close, but it took little time to understand that behind the handsome face and charming smile there was a sterile coldness there that lent itself to a gaze that held little interest other than clinical curiosity. He had with him a tall man in a fine red coat, a man who did not speak but was even more handsome than the Doctor himself, handsome despite the nose that hooked slightly at the tip and nearly comically jugged ears jutting out from either side of his lean stubbled face. The tall man was not introduced outside of being mentioned as a colleague of the Doctor’s, and though the coldness of the Doctor was not present in this man there was something there in his eyes that suggested some vast distance or secret knowledge that made her heart feel chilled somehow. 

She had welcomed them in and after some perfunctory questions, they proceeded upstairs to her room for her examination where the tall man gently helped her out of her clothes down to her shift. She couldn’t explain it then, but when his fingertips brushed her skin she felt something almost like a burning – not of desire, but of some other alien emotion that made her very skin seem to want to shrink away from his touch as if he were touching with an intent to steal something from her insides. The examination had gone as expected, until the moment when the Doctor asked the tall man to prepare her for the stimuli testing. She remembered looking up at this tall man as he guided her down onto her bed and as he performed the tasks dictated by the Doctor she thought that he looked strangely familiar – like she had seen him before, but her thoughts did not wander long as he began the stimuli testing. Even now her face burned at the reactions that were drawn from her, reactions that both filled her with revulsion and a sick shameful desire but seemed to please the Doctor as reactions that he had hoped to see. She endured the stimulus tests that first time, and every time after and to her dismay found herself even at this low moment in her morning wondering if perhaps another session might help. 

She watched the wharf roach crawling along the sill, clearly unafraid of her – inching closer to her hand. She could hear it, the plates of its insectoid shell rubbing against themselves, the soft scritch of its legs along the grain of the wood of the windowsill. She focused on it now, the missing cloaking momentarily forgotten. There was another sound coming from the roach now, some strange sort of cracking from its insides and to her horrified awe a tiny black wet-looking tip broke through one of what she supposed was its eyes and started to grow slowly outward. It was like nothing she had seen – a thin shiny black living string of some kind extruding from the eye of this roach, slowly undulating in a nearly sensual way – its blunt wet-looking tip waving to and fro as if waiting. There was another small crack from inside the roach and a second thin black string-like thing protruded from the other eye and joined the first one in some hypnotic waving dance until they stopped and seemed to _focus_ on her in unison. She hadn’t realized she was holding her breath until she gasped and exhaled nearly simultaneously leaving her light headed. She could hear something different in the quiet now – some whispery tinny slithering that seemed to come from the roach but also filled the room around her - whispering from behind the walls, from under the floor, down from the ceiling. She cleared her mind then, and took a deep breath willing this all to disappear but when she opened her eyes the roach was still there and she realized that it was _speaking_ to her. She could hear the sounds, and they somehow congealed to something almost like words in her mind. It was pushing into her mind, urging her to open up _we have a secret for you Addie, a secret just for you_. Yes, she understood now. In a daze, she stood back from the window and her arms rose up and out from either side of her as of their own accord and she heard a voice speak aloud, a voice she had never heard before – her own, and it said “Undress me”. 

She stood naked in the weak sunlight, the housecoat laying forgotten at her feet. They came to her then, first one and then another, and then hundreds at once clambering over each other and filling the room with the sounds of their hard shells rubbing and clicking in a mass twenty deep each sending the wet black wormlike things out of their eyes, growing longer now as they caressed her skin – touching her here and there as the roaches made their way up her body. She sighed with pleasure as the first one wedged itself in the corner of her open eyelid at her right eye and forced itself around her eyeball and into the tight wet space of her eye socket, and finally popped through behind it sending the long black wet strings ahead deep into her brain, stroking the very pleasure center of the brain itself. At first they entered her one by one – wedging with a nearly unbearable pleasure into her eyes, her nostrils and then by the dozens they filled her mouth, and her ears in a single file – each caressing her from the inside with their shiny black blunt-tipped tendrils. She could feel them inside her skull, their tightly-packed friction bringing her warmth as they filled her throat and poured down into her chest and gut. From below, she could feel them on her legs, wreathing her thighs with their ever-growing black tendrils. She feels herself lifted slightly, opened – so many of them now that they support her form an inch or so off the floor. They climb her legs in gluts now, thick nearly-solid swarms that linger over her knees, the backs of her calves and the tops of her thighs before making their way toward the middle of her. She shudders as they touch her, the tendrils now knotted into a thick rope that picks up pressure and she thinks of the tall man in the red jacket as they crawl into her all at once _too many too many_ her mind screams but after a brief moment of pressure they break through into her and her thoughts turn inside out with raw unfiltered pleasure. They come to her in waves, each glut more roach-swollen than the last until she is shuddering uncontrollably and without warning she was overcome with wave after wave of pleasure as the tendrils penetrated deeper into the base of her brain frothing up a chemical mix of nearly unbearable sensations. They are opening her from the inside, roughly parting her brain – entering beyond the meat and bone of her frame to the hole in her brain where her childhood turtle used to live, replacing the lost power of one with the power of itself – filling her emptiness, flooding her with sickly warmth, and she rode the crescendo into a final release that tore the fabric of her soul apart. She heard glass breaking from somewhere, the sound of small trinkets falling from shelves but she was caught in this moment of opening as the last of them flooded her insides and settled themselves into her flesh, her bones, her guts, the soft meat of her eyes and tongue. For a moment she was still except for the aftershocks exploding throughout her body, her thighs shuddering violently with each wave. Her head was thrown back, and animal grunts of pleasure tore at her throat and then, suddenly – it ended.

She stood for a moment, naked and confused in the growing sunlight of the morning – no sign of the roaches – no shudders or tweaks of pleasure. Just naked and alone, and cold. She wondered if she had hallucinated, and wandered dreamlike into the washroom. In the mirror, she saw herself as she never could have imagined – her hair was wild around her face, tangled and light brown curls at her hairline were plastered damply to her head and face. She was soaked with sweat, her lips swollen and red and her skin mottled. From her neck down to her chest was a swath of blotchy red. She thought about washing and pulling her hair back into place but decided that perhaps she’d rather have tea instead, or maybe something to eat. She was hungry now, hungrier than she could remember in a while. She walked naked back out into her room, and made her way down the stairs paying no mind to the shards of glass on the floor from fallen portraits and decorative plates that had been shaken from walls. The skin along the bottoms of her feet mended itself as quickly as it was sliced open, and she felt no pain. As she searched her cabinets for something that would sate her appetite, she heard their voices from inside again - this time all the voices speaking as one _‘Addie, come to me.’_ She closed the cabinets, and ran up the stairs taking them several at a time. She picked the first outfit she came upon – a dress that was meant for some soiree or other but had hung unused in her closet. She let her hair stay loose around her face and down over her shoulders, tightened the laces of her bodice only slightly and then bounded back downstairs where she threw open the door to the morning. She could smell something on the air – something that she knew she had to have. She stepped out into the street barefooted, and was almost sad to see that all of the kids were gone now – except one. He stood with his back against the wall right next to the small dead-end alley that was across from her house, flicking ash from his cigarette between long drags. He was older, a young man just entering adulthood and she recognized him as the long-time ringleader of the kids who had tormented her for so long. He watched her, his face caught somewhere between a sneer and alarm at her appearance.

She approached him, her expression languid – her eyes half-lidded with desire. He let her come close, intrigued by this very different presentation of Creepy Addie. She brought her face to his and his eyes widened as she spoke – her lips nearly touching his, her voice husky and rough – “I want to taste you”. He flicked away his cigarette and wasted no time backing her into the alley. Creepy or not, he wasn’t about to miss this chance. He pressed her hard against the wall with the weight of himself and when his mouth sealed over hers, his eyes bulged for less than a second before the empty shell of his body collapsed dry and rubbery at her feet. She drew the mass of black tendrils back into her mouth, savoring the various tastes of the soft insides of his body. The thick smoky-tar residue in his lungs, the satisfying pop of his eyeballs and gush of the jelly from inside them, the burn of his acidic guts in her own and the salt of his many fluids. She absorbed him, and every thought he had ever had, every memory, every dream, every fear – everything that had made up the whole of his mind was absorbed into her along with the soft meat of him. She burped lightly and rubbed her trim middle. She was full for now, sated and as she stood in the street looking for some bearing she heard the voices again calling as one _‘Addie, come to me’_ and so Addie did – following her feet as they led her to the Old Port District, where the red-haired woman waited for her.


End file.
